Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in Aeon about the hypercurious mind about how our brains often feel constrained in some environments and excel in others:
What if we’ve been looking at this backwards? What if the question isn’t what constrains attention, but what captures it? In many people with ADHD, signals linked to curiosity – such as novelty, uncertainty, prediction error, informational reward – carry higher motivational weight. In plain terms, some cues feel disproportionately worth following. From this perspective, what looks like distractibility can be understood as rapid, stimulus-driven reallocation of attention toward whatever promises the greatest payoff. The delay aversion, the executive struggles, the altered reward-processing – they can all be seen as downstream expressions of a brain that has fundamentally different priorities about what deserves attention, priorities that may have served early human societies in certain environments long before modern medicine defined them as a disorder.